[Plugin: Elastic Theme Editor] any documentation available?

Hey Ovidiu,

I’ll be writing and adding a bunch of documentation this week (Elastic is a Summer of Code project, and this is the final week).

Installation instructions and frequently asked questions are now available on the download page. Screenshots will be added soon.

Themes are saved into the themes folder, and are complete WordPress themes. However, the theme editor can only edit themes that it has created.

The download page now has a (slightly) clearer description the editor. In a nutshell: Elastic allows the user to create and edit themes by breaking themes down into pieces which can be dragged around a canvas. The user can also customize other parts of their theme, such as the typography (additional customizations are in development).

For the moment, Elastic has not been tested with WPMU.

Elastic isn’t that similar to the Theme Options plugin. While Theme Options provides users a way of managing and editing code snippets, Elastic provides users with a way to customize a theme without writing any code.

Hope this answered your questions.

sounds better now. will give it a try…

btw. I know a lot of people would be greatly interested if this was wpmu compatible. thus people would no longer be tied down by the themes offered but rather by their imagination…

but it needs to be foolproof otherwise one blogger coudl crash the whole wpmu installation…

…

ok, here is more feedback:

shouldn’t it come with theme options? I mean I’d like to be able to configure the header, background image, show blogname/deescription yes/no, etc.

integrating menus in the header still needs theme editing, right?

Yeah. The editor is still very much in beta (v0.0.2.4), so pretty much all of the things that you’ve mentioned are things I plan to add.

WPMU support is on the features list as well. Ideally, I’d like the plugin to be compatible with all versions of WP, but it needs some time to get there. ??

If you customized your fonts, you’ll notice that the default theme doesn’t exactly reflect your customizations… that will be fixed soon.

Thanks for testing it out!

Well since everytime I try to save, it hangs, there’s no way to see it do anything really.

cool, lets keep communicating in this thread. I’ll keep trying out your new versions and will give you feedback in this thread…

mmkay ~ it saved… but it doesn’t show up in my themes…
And I can’t go back an edit it…
and if you do ‘load theme’ and the pulldown is empty it hangs.

Ovidiu: sounds great

NHL23: that (obviously) shouldn’t be happening. Can you tell me what version of wp you’re running and what version of PHP you’re using? Also, I’m assuming you’re using the latest version of elastic?

also, that load theme bug will probably be fixed by next release.

wp 2.8.4
php 5
elastic 0.2.6

no I was using 4.4.9 ~ now I am using 5, and WOW errors galore when I activated the theme…

16 times I got:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /*/wp-content/themes/cs1/library/classes/module.php on line 157

Several of these:

Warning: Missing argument 2 for Module::_load_file_view() in /*/wp-content/themes/cs1/library/classes/module.php on line 202

Hm. Was it not saving under php4? Also, I’m guessing you can now see your theme in the themes menu? (Elastic *should* work for both php4 and php5, but php4 has had some errors).

For the warnings, I found the bug causing both of them. They should be fixed in the next release.

Warnings aside (and crazy typography aside), is the theme rendering okay? No fatal errors?

I switched to php5.

php4 i Coudln’t see a theme, php5 I can. the theme look to be working besides the errors, so many of them I had to scroll a long ways down.

Okay, good to know. What version of php4 were you using? I ran a few tests on php4 earlier and wasn’t getting any errors, but clearly something’s failing—I’ll try and replicate your results when I get the chance. Was the save function hanging in php4? If so, the editor probably couldn’t write to the filesystem. Did you get any erroneous php callbacks or javascript errors? I’ll try and write some error detection in so this will be clearer in the future. ??

I’m glad it’s rendering properly on php5. Those warnings should be gone by next release, which is coming soon.

Thanks for testing!